LAKE BENANEE.

This wood we also at length reached, and we found that it encircled a beautiful lake full sixteen miles in circumference and swarming with natives both on the beach and in canoes.

The alarm of our arrival was then resounding among the natives whom I saw in great numbers along its western shores.  This lake, like all those we had previously seen, was surrounded by a ridge of red earth, rather higher than the adjacent plains, and it was evidently fed, during high floods, by the creek we had crossed.  I travelled due west from the berg of this lake along the plain which extended in that direction a mile and three-quarters.  We then came to another woody hollow or channel in which I could at first see only a field of polygonum, although we soon found in it a broad deep reach of still water.  In tracing it to the left or from the lake towards the river, we found it increased so much in width and depth, after tracing it three-quarters of a mile, that a passage in that direction seemed quite out of the question.  Many of the natives who had followed us in a body from the lake overtook us here.  They assured Piper that we were near the junction of this piece of water with the Millewa (Murray) and that in the opposite direction, or towards the lake, they could show us a ford.  We accordingly turned and we came to a narrow place where the natives had a fish-net set across.  On seeing us preparing to pass through the ford, they told Piper that, at a point still higher up, we might cross where the channel was dry.  Thither therefore we went, the natives accompanying us in considerable numbers, but each carrying a green bough.  Among them were several old men who took the most active part and who were very remarkable from the bushy fulness and whiteness of their beards and hair; the latter growing thickly on the back and shoulders gave them a very singular appearance, and accorded well with that patriarchal authority which the old men seem to maintain to an astonishing degree among these native tribes.  The aged chiefs from time to time beckoned to us, repeating very often and fast at the same time “goway, goway, goway,” which, strange to say, means “come, come, come.”  Their gesture and action being also precisely such as we should use in calling out “go away!” We crossed the channel at length where the bed was quite dry, and pitched our tents on the opposite side.

DISCOVER THE NATIVES TO BE THOSE LAST SEEN ON THE DARLING.

It will however be readily understood with what caution we followed these natives when we discovered, almost as soon as we fell in with them, that they were actually our old enemies from the Darling!  I had certainly heard, when still far up on the Lachlan, that these people were coming down to fight us; but I little expected they were to be the first natives we should meet with on the Murray, at a distance of nearly two hundred miles from the scene of our former encounter.